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Palanan
2022-04-09, 07:43 PM
I’ve been trying to run a game on Roll20 for over a year now, and every single session has had some excruciating issue that causes scream-in-a-pillow frustration for the DM and long delays for everyone else.

It’s always been a steep learning curve for me, and here lately we’ve been running our audio through Discord because of severe audio problems with Roll20, and…just too much else to list.

At this point I really want to find another VTT that’s easier to learn, easier to use, and without constant issues. But I don’t know which way to turn. There’s Astral, there’s Foundry, there’s Mythic Table—they all sound great, but I could use some advice on which would work best for me.

I don’t need rulesets or modules loaded into the VTT, but I would like to use reasonably large battlemaps that can be navigated easily—this has been a particular frustration with Roll20. A platform that works well with music and voice chat would also be ideal, though we can still resort to Discord if we have to.

Beyond that, I’d like an interface that’s simple, intuitive, and doesn’t create more problems than it solves. Is there something like that out there?

Kraynic
2022-04-09, 09:09 PM
Some things to think about as you look around:

1) Voice/video will likely be an issue wherever you go. Roll20 uses webrtc, which is peer to peer, meaning that if you are in a game with 5 other people, you are streaming 5 simultaneous streams directly to their browsers. Foundry uses the same thing. This is because they don't particularly want to pay for your communication bandwidth (can't really blame them there), so they make the people logged in to carry the communication. Generally, I think people on Roll20 use Discord or whatever for voice/video. I believe there is a module for Foundry that uses Jitsi, but if you don't have a paid sub for Jitsi, then the connections are capped (at 4 or 5, I think). Discord isn't uncommon for Forge users.

Basically, integrated communication is likely to be an issue. Plan on working around that in whatever way works for your group.

2) Astral is no longer under active development, according to an email I got a few months ago. I have an account there, and thought it looked like it had promise. Unless something has changed, then it is on its way out, so it probably isn't a viable option going forward.

3) There will be a learning curve for any vtt you decide to run. Tabletop rpgs are not simple things, so the programs that enable play online aren't simple either. Whether you are learning the ins and outs of using your computer to host games and troubleshoot your players connecting to your machine, or you are keeping you and your players tuned up to have your browsers and associated settings correct to have a reliable experience with online hosting,, well... there is likely to always be something you need to pay attention to on the tech side.

Disclaimer: I have both run and played games on Roll20. I have played games on Foundry. I have messed around on Astral. I have never messed with Mythic or Fantasy Grounds, so don't really know much about those 2.

Personally, I find Roll20 to be all I need. However, I don't use sound effects or background music. I will say though, that (depending on your maps) you may just be making your maps too large. Depending on the size, you may be pushing the rendering capacity of people to the limit (just in pixel count), and then if everyone is needing to render dynamic lighting on top of that, you may be needing to adjust how you set up maps no matter where you go.

Zhorn
2022-04-09, 09:20 PM
As much as I like foundry and recommend it as my VTT of choice; if you are looking for easy then I might hesitate a little.
Foundry takes work. To set up, to learn, to troubleshoot.
Sure there are ways to have it be plug'n'play, but a big appeal of foundry comes from the community created modules, and with so many different programmers of varying levels of skill and communication between eachother, not everything is going to 100% 'just work' without learning to tinker.

When you know what you're working with, understanding which module developers to trust and can keep your module list small, it can be very easy from that point onwards. But it takes some work to get there.

Grod_The_Giant
2022-04-09, 10:15 PM
I did a lot of digging into this recently, and I can sum up my findings with a mangled Churchill quote-- "Roll20 is the worst VTT except for all the others."

While it can be clunky and overcomplicated sometimes, the nice thing about roll20 is that most of that complexity is optional. If you don't care about character macros or dynamic line-of-sight or something, it's all really easy to ignore. You can just slap some tokens on the board and go, whereas competitors felt like they had much more of a learning curve. It's also much more system-neutral than things like Astral, which is nice when you play things other than 5e D&D.

The other nice-and-surprisingly-rare thing about roll20 is that it has actual drawing tools. You can actually sketch out a battle map in a reasonably short amount of time, and easily add or remove notes and markings and things mid-session. It sounds basic, but I really struggled trying to do something similar in Foundry or Fantasy Grounds*.

The best non-roll20 simple VTT I found was owlbear.rodeo. It takes a similarly bare-bone approach--you create a new map using a background image (which can be blank), you can do MS Paint style drawings, and you can drag and drop tokens. It does some things I really wish roll20 did (you can lock tokens in place! Mounts and vehicles actually work!) and fails at others (you can't stretch a token in only one direction, you can't move drawings around once you draw them).

The biggest downside is that it's really JUST a tabletop-- there's no way to share documents or attach character sheets to things, there's no initiative or health tracking, the die roller doesn't allow modifiers, that sort of thing. There's a third-party Chrome extension that adds some of this functionality back, but it's still pretty bare-bones. (which is ultimately the point)



*In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that it was an old version of FG.

Zhorn
2022-04-09, 10:46 PM
I did a lot of digging into this recently, and I can sum up my findings with a mangled Churchill quote-- "Roll20 is the worst VTT except for all the others."
that's... actually pretty accurate.

As frustrated as I got with roll20, I do have to give it point for it's out-of-the-box accessibility.
Ignore the bells and whistles and it does shine.

I've recommended to a few people in the past "if you want a free VTT use roll20, but if you plan to spend any amount of money just go direct to foundry"

Kraynic
2022-04-09, 10:53 PM
I've recommended to a few people in the past "if you want a free VTT use roll20, but if you plan to spend any amount of money just go direct to foundry"

I'm not sure I agree with that, since I find the subscriber benefits quite worth it. But then I play a system that I wrote the character sheet for on Roll20, and if I switch to Foundry I would have to design the system all over again.

Zhorn
2022-04-09, 11:31 PM
I'm not sure I agree with that, since I find the subscriber benefits quite worth it. But then I play a system that I wrote the character sheet for on Roll20, and if I switch to Foundry I would have to design the system all over again.
Understood, though that's more a case of the better system for you is the one you started on.
Alternate-universe-you started on foundry and so having made their custom modifications over there would be at a disadvantage to switch to roll20.
And Alternate-alternate-universe-you did the same thing on fantasy grounds, etc.

Kraynic
2022-04-10, 01:00 AM
Understood, though that's more a case of the better system for you is the one you started on.
Alternate-universe-you started on foundry and so having made their custom modifications over there would be at a disadvantage to switch to roll20.
And Alternate-alternate-universe-you did the same thing on fantasy grounds, etc.

Maybe, but with how quickly updates come to the foundry core that can affect everything running on top of it, I'm not sure I would want to create and the repeatedly have to update a sheet/module to keep it working on Foundry. If you don't keep up, then people using your sheet/system module can't update core Foundry, and then potentially lose support for other modules they use to run their games.

I don't envy module maintainers at all on that platform. When it becomes more stable, it would be more appealing from that aspect of things. As it stands now, it is hard to justify doing much for anything that would have a small user base.

KorvinStarmast
2022-04-12, 03:39 PM
Roll20 + discord is what four different groups I play with do.
Foundry + discord is what one group I play with does.

We started roll20 in 2014 with voice and video but because we were not all using the same browser, and for a few other reasons, we often had messups.
As the platform / game got larger and our group got bigger it got worse.
We switched to Skype for voice.
Worst Idea Ever.

Began using discord and roll20 as a player in Giants Campaign (TotYP) a few years back and never looked back.

It's the best way to do it.

Roll20 Map size: Yeah, it can get clunky. There's a reason that most maps are kind of small.
If you take a small map and stretch it about 50% larger, it's usually OK, but heading towards double or greater and in no time the map gets clunky.

Our games with 8 people and 1 DM can slow to a crawl sometime.
But it's doable.

Jorren
2022-04-12, 08:16 PM
One thing that should be pointed out is that R20 has a built in search function on its webpage where it is easy to find games as a player. As a GM, you have a large base to advertise your game to if you don't already have an established group. The discord pages for the other VTTs do not have anything like that.

I would agree that if you have a well established group that always plays together and is willing to learn the ropes, Foundry and many of the other VTTs might provide better functionality for a one time fee. But for finding games/players? Nothing really comes close to R20.

R20 + Discord works reasonably well for most games.

Palanan
2022-04-12, 08:48 PM
Originally Posted by Kraynic
Some things to think about as you look around:

I appreciate your overall comments, especially about voice/video issues.


Originally Posted by Kraynic
I will say though, that (depending on your maps) you may just be making your maps too large. Depending on the size, you may be pushing the rendering capacity of people to the limit (just in pixel count), and then if everyone is needing to render dynamic lighting on top of that, you may be needing to adjust how you set up maps no matter where you go.

Not sure what you mean by “rendering capacity of people.” Not a phrase that I can work out.

As for map size, I’m used to working with maps that are about 30 x 50” for live tabletop games, using the standard scale of 1” = 5’ in-game, and I’d like to be able to work with maps on that same scale in a VTT. So far Roll20 has been incredibly difficult when it comes to viewing, moving and scaling maps, and above all else I’d like a VTT that’s less miserable when it comes to maps.


Originally Posted by Zhorn
…a big appeal of foundry comes from the community created modules….

When you know what you're working with, understanding which module developers to trust and can keep your module list small, it can be very easy from that point onwards. But it takes some work to get there.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “modules” here. In the RPG context, I think of a module as a self-contained adventure, e.g. Keep on the Borderlands. Is that the sense you’re using here, or something else?


Originally Posted by Grod_The_Giant
While it can be clunky and overcomplicated sometimes, the nice thing about roll20 is that most of that complexity is optional…. You can just slap some tokens on the board and go, whereas competitors felt like they had much more of a learning curve.

I appreciate your thoughts here, but I have a feeling you’re a much savvier and more experienced Roll20 user than I am. For myself and my group, Roll20 has a painfully steep learning curve, and much of it is completely nonintuitive.


Originally Posted by Grod_The_Giant
*Owlbear Rodeo*

This looks promising, thanks.


Originally Posted by Jorren
One thing that should be pointed out is that R20 has a built in search function on its webpage where it is easy to find games as a player. As a GM, you have a large base to advertise your game to if you don't already have an established group. The discord pages for the other VTTs do not have anything like that.

Thanks, I’ll keep this in mind.

Kraynic
2022-04-12, 09:46 PM
Not sure what you mean by “rendering capacity of people.” Not a phrase that I can work out.

As for map size, I’m used to working with maps that are about 30 x 50” for live tabletop games, using the standard scale of 1” = 5’ in-game, and I’d like to be able to work with maps on that same scale in a VTT. So far Roll20 has been incredibly difficult when it comes to viewing, moving and scaling maps, and above all else I’d like a VTT that’s less miserable when it comes to maps.

Once you move to a digital space, the grid size doesn't mean a whole lot. Just using that grid size as an example:
1. Is your 30x50 map one that is made for online use, which will likely be 70 or so pixels per grid unit? That would be 2100x3500 pixels.
2. Is your 30x50 map one that is high enough quality to print, so likely 300 pixels per grid unit? That would be 9000x15000 pixels.
3. Something else?
Some computers, especially ones running on integrated (into the cpu) graphics will start to choke on images with much over 8000 pixels in any dimension.

Another metric to look at is: what is the file size before you upload the image? I generally upload images as .jpg. Roll20 takes them through some sort of conversion that increases the file size, adds transparency, and who knows what all. Your storage is docked based on the initial image upload size, but you and your players will need to render the more complex image after going through the conversion. In my own games, I had a player that couldn't render map images that were much over 2mb (at upload). When he moved to a place with better internet service, those problems went away, but I have kept my image sizes small anyway. Just as an example, I just recently uploaded a continent map I made with Wonderdraft that is 2800x2160 pixels (roughly 40x31 grid units) and is only 2.09mb.

Keep the dimensions and file sizes as reasonable as you can. Scale the images down and/or drop the quality if you need to to get them small enough to render quickly, and don't allow the images to be bigger than absolutely necessary to get a decent image in a browser (may require some testing and your mileage may vary based on taste).


I’m not quite sure what you mean by “modules” here. In the RPG context, I think of a module as a self-contained adventure, e.g. Keep on the Borderlands. Is that the sense you’re using here, or something else?

Module has a different meaning for Foundry. The Foundry core program is a framework. Most things you want to do will involve installing modules that provide functionality within Foundry. For example, there is a module called Dice So Nice that allows some nice looking customizable dice skins in game. The game system you want to play will be a module. If you install a pre-packaged adventure for that game system, it will be a module. And so on, and so forth...

Faily
2022-04-13, 07:54 AM
There is Tabletop Simulator on Steam if you just need to simulate having a blank battlemap, but that costs money, and if you thought Roll20 was hard to use, I found TTS to be superannoying (and I only use it for boardgames).


With Roll20, I really do recommend going through their tutorials. I found that they helped a bunch to make Roll20 easy and more intuitive to use. And as others mentioned, shut off everything sound on Roll20 and use Discord for voice. Roll20 works best without voice/vid-chat, and you really don't need stuff like dynamic lighting or dynamic line-of-sight. There's also good guides and FAQs online for Roll20.


But I am curious what seems to be the issues with Roll20 for you? If you're using it for voice and playing music, and it's slowing stuff down, then I think this is an issue you'll find with almost any other online-gaming platform like this. For the reasons others brought up above me. Two of my playgroups have used Roll20 for a couple of years (one when a player moved abroad, another after lockdowns started).


IME, playing online will almost *always* be a bit of a slower pace than playing face-to-face. For us, the slower pace of online-tabletop varies from tech-problems on our ends (computer-issues or connection problems), Roll20 doing something weird for someone (like the battlemap not updating after moving), or problems completey unrelated to the game (because people are sitting at home so there are way more interruptions from various family members).

KorvinStarmast
2022-04-13, 08:05 AM
IME, playing online will almost *always* be a bit of a slower pace than playing face-to-face. For us, the slower pace of online-tabletop varies from tech-problems on our ends (computer-issues or connection problems), Roll20 doing something weird for someone (like the battlemap not updating after moving), or problems completly unrelated to the game (because people are sitting at home so there are way more interruptions from various family members). This our experience as well.

Anonymouswizard
2022-04-13, 09:36 AM
Honestly I've never used anything other than Roll20, but I've also never needed anything other than it's basic functionality. Character sheets, handouts, the dice roller, and the ability to use the maps as blank paper has always been enough for me. It's a bit clunky, but it's free and probably has the character sheets I need on there.

Grod_The_Giant
2022-04-13, 10:23 AM
IME, playing online will almost *always* be a bit of a slower pace than playing face-to-face. For us, the slower pace of online-tabletop varies from tech-problems on our ends (computer-issues or connection problems), Roll20 doing something weird for someone (like the battlemap not updating after moving), or problems completey unrelated to the game (because people are sitting at home so there are way more interruptions from various family members).
Very much this, yeah.

PhoenixPhyre
2022-04-13, 10:29 AM
My experience with Foundry VTT (self-hosted in AWS, which is not for the faint of heart or not-technically-minded) is that the binding constraint for maps is file size. 1MB is about as big as won't cause issues. And memory constraints bite hard--I had to upgrade to a bigger "server" type.

I've found that using settings like
* 70 PPI (so a 10x10 square map ends up being 700 px square)
* 50% quality in Dungeondraft (or re-exporting online-sourced maps to 50% JPEG quality)
* Not using heavy animation in the map layer
* JPG, not PNG (for photo-like images, JPG does a much better job. WebP is even better, but my toolchain doesn't support it).
make a big difference in stability. Plus there's issues with resolution--one player had issues because his computer was scaling things so it thought it had a lower resolution than the minimum.

And absolutely using Discord for voice rather than the built-in ones is big. It also provides a nice between-game channel for communications and RP and planning. And memes, of course. Memes are indispensible.

Kurald Galain
2022-04-13, 01:25 PM
I did a lot of digging into this recently, and I can sum up my findings with a mangled Churchill quote-- "Roll20 is the worst VTT except for all the others."
Pretty much this. I've done a lot of online play the past years, and pretty much all of it is Roll20 + Discord. It's basically the gold standard for organized play.

A handful of people swear by foundry but it is so. extremely. slow. Not just because it underperforms on low-end computers (although it does), but mainly because the interface is very exacting. You have to do all the moves and spells and buffs in exactly the right way or it won't work; whereas in Roll20 you can wing and improvise most of it. Unless your players are particularly meticulous, this is an ongoing aggravation that slows gameplay to a crawl.

...so, I recommend you look into Roll20's character sheets. At least for Pathfinder, there are three different roll20 sheets, and the most commonly used one is really overcomplicated; the other two play much faster. There likely is a similar situation for 3.5 games.

Xervous
2022-04-13, 02:11 PM
I swear by foundry because it’s the VTT that let me make good on “roll 20 is barebones, if only I was allowed to add five or five thousand lines of simple code” or have lighting without paying a lousy subscription.

Trafalgar
2022-04-14, 12:59 AM
One thing that should be pointed out is that R20 has a built in search function on its webpage where it is easy to find games as a player. As a GM, you have a large base to advertise your game to if you don't already have an established group. The discord pages for the other VTTs do not have anything like that.


In my opinion, this is why Roll20 has such a big market share. I only started playing in VTTs 6 months ago and the reason I use Roll20 is purely the "Join a Party" function. It's much easier for a noob to use and search than any of the LFG forums I have seen for Foundry.

In fact, I am doing a 100% "Theater of the Mind" game in Dischord that I found through Roll 20!

farothel
2022-04-14, 04:05 AM
We use Foundry for our games and that works well, although I'm just a player, but our GM doesn't really complain a lot about the back office work to get it working, so it shouldn't be too bad.

I have some issues with some maps, but that's because my laptop's graphics card is quite old and not up to it.

We do use a separate Google Meeting for talking to each other, not the Foundry option as that gave issues for us. It's quite easy to set-up and if you have issues with Foundry, you can still talk to each other to try and solve the issue.

Chronic
2022-04-14, 04:07 AM
I've been playing by internet for years and I mostly use roll 20. But I've realized over the year that for me, simpler is better. I barely use any advanced functions anymore. I even avoid using battlemaps if possible. Because setting up things take time I could use to do something else, either working on more important aspects of the game (like characters, encounter design or stories) or simply doing something else. My motto has become "if i can't easily describe it or explain it, it has no business being in my games". A lot less energy spent in prep, a lot more in game. The basic functions of roll20 are great for that.

DigoDragon
2022-04-14, 08:49 AM
I've been using Fantasy Grounds Unity for a long while. There is a big initial cost for the GM license, but player side is free once that's covered. I find it is well-built and automates so many things for you.

As for the voice chat part, my group uses Discord. It just works so conviniently.